This watchdog blog, by journalist Norman Oder, offers analysis, commentary, and reportage about the $4.9 billion project to build the Barclays Center arena and 16 high-rise buildings at a crucial site in Brooklyn. Dubbed Atlantic Yards by developer Forest City Ratner in 2003, it was rebranded Pacific Park in 2014 after the Chinese government-owned Greenland Group bought a 70% stake in 15 towers. New York State still calls it Atlantic Yards. Contact: AtlanticYardsReport[at]hotmail.com

And Penn’s path to local redevelopment, after decades as the eight-hundred pound gorilla, depended on planning, but not on monolithic Plans. Indeed, Rodin warned at a recent panel that Penn’s experience was its own, not a blueprint. Still, a caution is valuable.

She writes that Penn decided to roll out implementation of the West Philadelphia Initiatives rather than announce a comprehensive master plan:In the matter of testing and learning, our view was based on the work of Charles Lindblom and James Scott, each of whom studied failed attempts at social change. In his 1990 book Inquiry and Change: The Troubled Attempt to Understand and Shape Society, Lindblom points out the impossibility of being truly comprehensive in urban planning from the start, because there are inevitable biases that frame the work in the abstract and there is an inexhaustible number of forces that enter into the life of cities over time that cannot be anticipated in advance. Among the recommendations to social change that Scott [in Seeing Like a State] advocates is to take small steps in an experimental approach, with the presumption that one cannot know the consequences of every intervention in advance.

This raises many questions about the environmental review process regarding major projects like Atlantic Yards. Among them: Can a ten-year effect on traffic and transit really be estimated? Is ten years a legitimate endpoint, or an arbitrary one? And what if the buildout would take much longer?